[DPRating] What are some Quality ICOs to invest in May?

11 min readMay 12, 2018

by Darpal Rating team, Translated by Peng Xiangxin& Tyler Garant

There is a staggering amount of new projects appearing on the market these days. Every week new tokens are listed on exchanges. It is increasingly difficult to stay well informed on the many projects entering this space, especially while also trying to keep track of the performance and progress of all those companies already solidified in the blockchain industry. It can all become a bit fatiguing! To help solve these issues we are happy to introduce our Quick ICO Rating list. In this list we have chosen a few projects (based on popularity) and dig in. We will have all the projects explained and a summary of all the rating scores is put at the end of the article, scroll down to the bottom to know which project gets the best rating.

Evaluation Dimensions:

Project: The project itself serves as the most important factor as we evaluate projects. Our evaluations will be given based on two sub-dimensions: strategic positioning and project necessity.

Team: In this dimension we mostly investigate the previous jobs and accomplishments of team members i.e. what projects they have worked on and their technical backgrounds. The operational experience of team members, the industrial resources they enjoy, and the previous investment history of investors and clients will also be considered.

Progress: Judging projects by the metric of progress is an effective method for evaluating the quality of growing projects; of course, this enables quality projects to receive a high score and lowers the score of unpractical projects. There are 5 stages of project progress: PPT(White paper) stage; Demo stage; under development stage or small-scale test stage; public beta stage or small-scale commercialization stage; large-scale revenue stage or actual profit stage. We will make evaluations according to these different stages.

Community Management: blockchain projects are based on a community ecology comprised of countless token holders. The management and activity of blockchain communities are indispensable factors that must be considered when we evaluate these projects. We will evaluate community management from these dimensions: financing, budget disclosure, fund supervision, token revaluation logic and so on.

Mainframe

Final evaluations: C+

Official website: https://mainframe.com/

White paper: https://mainframe.docsend.com/view/j39qpui

Project: one-to-one and many-to-many information sharing among different nodes and transmission of encryption protocols can not be read and traced by unauthorized parties. Token serves as rewards for nodes in the network that provide services such as data provision, confirmation, storage, search and routing. The aim of its application is to provide encrypted communication services, sdk tools etc. for different networks, public blockchains and communication applications.

Team: its two co-founders created Zinch (a school social network), but their experience in the development of blockchain is not mentioned.

Progress: development of test network was completed. And based on such test network, Onyx (an application) was released and presented on Ethereum Developers Conference in November 2017. Ideas, concepts and technologies are applied gradually in the development of Onyx which is still in the demo phase. And its follow-up focuses would be the completion of sdk， api and Onyx’s beta version.

Community: it made a private placement of 27 thousand ETH. Public financing was cancelled and replaced by three rounds of airdrop.

Comments: it has independent P2P network and protocol layer scheme. But its connection with blockchain is a little bit weak since its main connection is the reward for service nodes in the incentive layer. At the current stage, it is based on the network of Ethereum. However because of its positioning in the protocol layer, it may transfer on to other networks in the future. The major function of dark routing is to safeguard privacy and security in communications. Though it does not compete directly with Telegram and WhatsApp, compared with its formidable rival NKH (who has better team, technologies and partners), Mainframe’s current partnership is less competent and falls short of heavyweight resources. In the follow-up development, whether Mainframe can attract more enterprises, projects and applications to adopt its technologies is a noteworthy indicator.

Hashgraph

Final Evaluation: B-

Official website:

https://www.hederahashgraph.com/

White paper:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/hedera-hashgraph/hh-whitepaper-v1.0-180313.pdf

Project: it introduces Hash Map data structure and Gossip protocol to create a new distributed ledger platform in combination with virtual voting mechanism. The white paper of 76 pages focuses on the improvement of consensus mechanism aBFT and application scheme of BFT in public blockchain system. Since it is difficult to realise in terms of technologies, whether such engineering test can be performed in public blockchain is still not confirmed.

Team: information of core members can be checked at LinkedIn. Its co-founder holds a doctorate degree who together with Carnegie Mellon are inventors of Leemon (a hash graph distributed consensus algorithm). And its team member David is a former member of IOTA and also founder of Dcntral. Swirlds, a development company of Hashgraph distributed ledger, was set up in the year of 2016. Its platform which provides Swirlds sdk to enterprises is maintained by Swirlds Inc. In addition, HHC committee was established on an attempt to organise and manage Hedera Hashgraph platform by 39 enterprises in different industries and at different global areas.

Progress: there is no explicit roadmap. Currently, all of its deployments is on consortium blockchain. And among its partners, Machine Zone (a mobile game company) is relatively famous.

Community governance: aggregate amount of token is 50 billion among which 2 billion (4%) was put on sale at 0.12 dollars per unit. It thus raised 240 million dollars. So its market value now is 6 billion dollars. It adopted qualified investors system to winnow buyers which meant that individual investors basically could not participate in. Here is token’s publishing rules: 20% will be locked for 6 months while 80% for 8 months. Publishing time is in May according to the schedule, but it may change.

Risks: public blockchains that have been long deployed will hand in one answer sheet during Q2 or Q3 period in 2018. Grand-pattern Hashgraph is of great technical difficulties and the public does not enough understand its concept and technologies. In the fierce competition of various public blockchains, to fight a way out needs a strong team and executive ability.

Quarkchain

Final evaluations: C+

Official website: https://quarkchain.io/

White paper: https://quarkchain.io/20180421QuarkChain%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%99%BD%E7%9A%AE%E4%B9%A63.2.pdf

Project: QuarkChain’s technical summary is as follows: tow-layer blockchain (it constitutes of two-layer blockchain with elastic sharding blockchain as the first layer and using root blockchain to identify block shards as the second layer), cross-shard trading (cross-shard trading can be initiated at any time and confirmed in several minutes, its throughput will increase linearly along with the increase of shard quantity), market-driven collaborative digging (QuarkChain designs an incentive framework of game theory to stimulate hash power on an attempt to level allocation among different shards. 50% hash power is allocated to root blockchain in order to prevent double expenditure.), simple account management (all shards share one account and cryptocurrency from different shards is deposited in one smart wallet) and horizontal scalability (when TPS rises, supernodes may become extremely expensive. However, QuarkChain allows multiple honest nodes to work as a supernode)

Team: it has several senior software engineers: former engineer of Facebook and Google, CEO Qi Zhou who according to official website has more than 15 years’ experience in software development. He holds also a doctorate degree in Georgia Institute of Technology. However, at LinkedIn, he got enrolled by Peking University in 2002, which means his experience may be exaggerated; QuarkChain’s core engineer, Zhaoguang Wang is an expert in large-scale distributed system. He has more than 6 years’ work experience and holds a master degree of computer science in University of Michigan. This team lacks of experience in the development of blockchain which lowers its score. In terms of investment institutions, it officially declares that it boasts a large number in dispersed areas.

Progress: it is now in the small-scale test stage.

Community governance: the total financing according to official plan is reasonable, but specific amount is still undetermined.

NKN

Final evaluations: B-

Official website: https://nkn.org/

White paper: https://www.nkn.org/doc/NKN_Whitepaper.pdf

Project: according to NKN, static network topology is susceptible to errors and hostile attacks. Besides, there is no economic self-motivation scheme for network connections and data transmission at present. Moreover, the scalability of network is generally sacrificed in order to strengthen its controllability. All these problems can be solved by NKN. NKN has a lot of innovations, for example, a better consensus mechanism Proof of Relay(PoR) in consensus layer and rules of elementary cellular automaton & dynamic topology in network layer. It also introduces the concept of DDTN scheme, using distributed blockchains to provide the ability of network connections and data transmission and using large-scale relay nodes to solve the problem of redundant data in network. Since works during use provides more transmission energy, it benefits the whole network. And mining is redefined as the contribution to the layer of data transmission, the only way to obtain more reward is thus to provide more transmission ability. Competitions among different nodes in network will ultimately push the system in the direction of low latency and data transmission of high bandwidth. However, as the necessity and demand of blockchaining network is still uncertain, real demand may be weak. NKN obtains a high score in innovation and competitive field, but a B- in the dimension of project.

Team: most team members are technology developers, including a technology icon Li Yanbo who is also the founder of Onchain. Its advisor Diffie-Hellman is the recipient of Turing Award and also the inventor of public key cryptography. So the score of its team is high. Nonetheless, information of its investors is still unknown.

Community: its financing amount is reasonable, but budget plan, fund supervision, and information of buy-back and desterilization are undisclosed.

Comments: economic model and technical white paper are unpublished, so its evaluations may change.

BitCapitalVendor

Evaluations: D+

Official website: https://bitcv.one/

White paper: https://bitcv.one/doc/bitcv_whitepaper_tr.pdf

Project: on April 27th, Huobi will vote for projects of coin entry. According to the roadmap, YuBi Bao(financial services) will be put into operation at the beginning of February and blockchain services in the middle of March. However, there is no information at its official website.

Team: several team members are former members of Happy Net and the CEO of Happy Net is the advisor of this project. However, this team has no experience in the development of blockchain.

Comments: in the white paper, there is a buy-back plan. But after a proper read, we find that the so-called buy-back plan needs consumers to purchase tokens in exchanges.

Prochain

Final evaluations: C-

Official website: https://chain.pro/

White paper: http://oucxb2pew.bkt.clouddn.com/ProChain_CN.pdf

Project: based on the five pain points — opaque process of data delivery, click fraud, settlement delay, data island and user-shielded advertisements in advertising market, Prochain develops a system of precise advertisement distribution on the basis of big data. In this system, advisors release tasks via smart contract and users and media who trigger the advertisement will obtain rewards in PRA. Compared with BAT and other projects of advertisement distribution, advertising market is a game among advertisements, throughput and users, having a certain trust cost. The intermediate cost predicted by blockchain advertising system and the cost saving of user acquisition would be the weather vane for its further development. At the current stage, throughput on the blockchain remains tepid and the coverage of decentralised media is still limited.

Team: the executive team is experienced in software development but relatively feeble in the domain of blockchain development. Meng Yan, vice president of CSDN, is one of its advisors and its investors include Lin Jiapeng, founder of Link Capital and Du Jun, founder of Node Capital.

Progress: the development of minimum verifiable model and system testing were completed in integrated development of public blockchains during Q1 period in 2018. And the minimum workable product model of MVP which helps project proponents with project’s precise marketing was released. Its β- version had been brought online, sending directional try out invitations to advisors and target users. It initialises users’ network via traditional way of advertisement push. Its approach is quite simple, i.e. rewarding users who have clicked the advertisement with airdrop or candy tokens. The name of this product is Prabox which is now available in app store and its Android version will be available in April. Prabox is now still in the small-scale test stage.

Community: its financing amount is 8000eth in which the core team accounts for 20%. The lock time of it is only 6 months after which it will release 10% each month.

Ifoodschain

Final evaluation: C-

Official website: http://www.ifoodschain.io/index.html

White paper: https://lbcydemo.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/20180317145512.pdf

Characteristics of the project: the technical architecture of blockchain’s main chain is based on USP underlying system of PBT algorithm, deposit certificate of blockchain, sub-ecology of food testing and application of blockchain (super probe and F-seat system). The base of Foods chain independently develops a blockchain platform system which has a complete architecture of blockchain system. As for the acceptance level of super probe’s hardware and DAPP among end consumers, only time will tell.

Comments: according to the official statement, financing amount is 10 billion tokens. It had planned to sell 45% tokens which according to the market reduced to 25%-20%. Overseas public offering is undetermined. As for fund supervision, financial report of financing will be announced regularly in conformity with the using plan. And locked token will be supervised by community on blockchain.